The Cure’s Robert Smith explains the lyrics and inspiration behind ‘Alone’
Robert Smith has discussed the lyrics and inspiration for The Cure’s new single ‘Alone’ in a new video.
The Cure shared the track, the lead single from their upcoming album ‘Songs Of A Lost World’, on September 26, and it marks the first time the six-piece have shared new studio material since their 2008 album ‘4:13 Dream’.
Smith said at the time that the track was inspired by the Ernest Dowson poem Dregs, and he’s expanded on the inspiration further in a video uploaded to The Cure’s official YouTube channel.
“I rediscovered a poem by Ernest Dowson, an English poet – it’s called Dregs,” he began in the video. “I’ve got a book and I jot down over the years things that I think [are] interesting’. Some of it’s couplets, some of it’s rhymes, some of it’s words … it’s not a journal, a lot of it’s gobbledygook,” he laughed.
He continued, “Occasionally I’ll turn a page and there’ll be something and I think, ‘Oh, that’s great,’ and I’d actually transcribed this poem – I don’t know when – and I was struggling to find the right imagery for for ‘Alone’ … this poem, the opening line, I thought, ‘That’s it’.
“It was in the back of my mind … However I was writing it, it wasn’t poetic, and suddenly I discovered this and I thought, ‘That’s it, that’s what’s been bugging me,’ because I knew what the song was supposed to be about.”
The song begins with an otherworldly instrumental intro, before the lyrics come in at around the halfway mark – with a line the band have been teasing for a while. “This is the end of every song that we sing / The fire burned out to ash and the stars grown dim with tears,” Smith sings, echoing the first couple of lines in the poem: “The fire is out, and spent the warmth thereof / This is the end of every song man sings.”
“Cold and afraid, the ghosts of all that we’ve been / We toast with bitter dregs, to our emptiness,” Smith continues in the first verse, just as “the dregs remain” in the poem.
Upon the song’s release last month, he said, “It’s the track that unlocked the record; as soon as we had that piece of music recorded I knew it was the opening song, and I felt the whole album come into focus.
“I had been struggling to find the right opening line for the right opening song for a while, working with the simple idea of ‘being alone’, always in the back of my mind this nagging feeling that I already knew what the opening line should be.”
In 2019, following The Cure’s Glastonbury headline slot, Smith told NME that the album would be “merciless” and “express the darker side of what I’ve experienced over the last few years”, more reminiscent of their classic 1982 album Pornography.
He said, comparing himself at the time to who he was when ‘4:13 Dream’ came out: “I don’t think I’ve ever changed much particularly. The core of who I am remains the same. Just like everyone, I have good days and bad days. I think I’m generally more of a balanced individual than I was 10 years ago. I’ve experienced more of life’s darker side, for real.”
Speaking to NME backstage at the BandLab NME Awards 2022, Smith revealed that the band were working on two albums – describing ‘Songs Of A Lost World’ as “relentless doom and gloom” and the second one as “upbeat”.
Meanwhile, The Cure announced earlier this week that they’ll be playing two shows for the BBC at the end of the month. You can enter a ballot for tickets to the first show on the BBC’s website until 9pm BST October 9. The band have been teasing another song, ‘Endsong’, too.
‘Songs Of A Lost World’ will be out on November 1, with the tracklist and further details yet to be revealed. The album is available to preorder here. You can listen to ‘Alone’ here in the meantime.
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Adam England
NME
